Google takes a deep look at itself in 2009

Google has published it's 2009 Zeitgeist -- the yearly tradition that is the result of Google pouring over data to tell us what the highlights of last year were, according to what people like yourself searched for.

This year started off on a roll and never stopped. From bills in Washington D.C. to blow-ups on TV, there was no shortage of events to captivate our attention. We hope you enjoy this look back to what was on the minds of Americans throughout 2009. Unless otherwise noted, these queries were the most popular searches on Google in the U.S. in 2009.

They have broken it down into easily consumable lists that give you a sense of what the search landscape was over the past 11 months, and on each page, they show a different Google Trends graph.

Here one of the Google Trends graphs for Michael Jackson related searches -- I guess this is a pretty definitive way to tell which of his songs were the most popular.